Hacktivist group “Anonymous” has struck again in this country, leaking what the group says is a classified document from Canada’s spy agency CSIS.

The document is dated February of last year and reveals CSIS was trying to extend its secure network to twenty-five foreign stations.

The leaked document also reveals 70 CSIS operatives work at the stations, processing 22 500 messages a year.

A spokesperson with the government wouldn’t confirm the the legitimacy of the document.

“We do not comment on leaked documents and we continue to monitor this situation closely,” Jeremy Laurin said in an email.

Liberal MP Marc Garneau says the leak is troubling.

“I was very concerned when I found out that all of this information had been obtained by the group Anonymous,” Garneau said. “This is a very serious wake up call for the government, cyber security is a reality that we must address today.”

This latest hack is the latest in a long string. Last month, CSIS and the Government of Canada’s websites were victims of a cyber attack, and before that websites for the National Research Council and Revenue Canada were hacked.

Just last week, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney announced 142 million dollars in funding for cyber security over the next five years, which is in addition to 94.4 million dollars allotted in the budget.

RCMP and Canada’s electronic spy agency are investigating the leak of a secret government document dealing with CSIS, Canada’s main spy agency, CBC News has confirmed.

Cybercrime investigators with the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) are looking into how the online international activist group Anonymous obtained the classified document and then leaked it to the media.

The probe comes after the National Post on Tuesday published a Treasury Board document supplied by Anonymous that reveals CSIS operates 25 foreign stations around the globe.

Investigators are also trying to track down the people responsible to determine whether they violated Canada’s Security of Information Act.Etienne Rainville, a spokesman for the public safety minister, said little about the apparent breach or the document’s authenticity.

“We do not comment on leaked documents and we continue to monitor this situation closely,” he said in an email.

Anonymous demands action

In an accompanying video, Anonymous is threatening to release more sensitive government documents unless police in British Columbia do more to investigate the fatal RCMP shooting of Anonymous activist James McIntyre earlier this month in Dawson Creek.

The national RCMP website is offline and has been since the early morning, seemingly part of a larger cyber attack by the hacker group Anonymous, who have given an impossible deadline to the police to arrest a particular Mountie by the end of the day or watch as high-level documents are leaked.

Hackers with Anonymous claim to have repeatedly hacked supposedly impenetrable government servers over several months and vowed last week that they would leak the classified national security documents in retaliation for the fatal shooting of James McIntyre in Dawson Creek, B.C., earlier this month, unless the officer responsible is arrested.

The 48-year-old McIntyre, who was shot outside a BC Hydro public meeting in Dawson Creek last Thursday, reportedly died wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and wielding a knife. Others claiming to be Anonymous members say McIntyre was a First Nations Anonymous member who, using the Twitter handle @jaymack9, helped organize opposition to the Site C Dam in northeastern B.C.

The RCMP has been given until today at 5 p.m. Pacific time to either arrest the officer or watch as Anonymous release the documents. The government has confirmed it is aware of the threat, which was posted repeatedly on social media.

The breaches happened in stages over several months, an Anonymous spokesperson told The National Post.

The RCMP has yet to comment on the website going offline early Monday and whether it’s due to maintenance or the result of an attack.

If what Anonymous is claiming is true, statements from the government that the low-level cyber attacks had no impact would be false and instead suggest the hacks may have gone undetected and deeper than the agencies were aware.

The hacktivists said the document dump was originally planned for September but was moved up because of the Dawson Creek shooting.

Hackers with Anonymous say they breached supposedly secure Canadian government computers and accessed high-level, classified national security documents as retaliation for last week’s fatal shooting by the RCMP of a protester in British Columbia.

To support their claim, members of Anonymous provided the National Post with a document that appears to be legitimate Treasury Board of Canada notes on federal cabinet funding to fix flaws in the foreign stations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

The Post has not independently been able to verify the authenticity of the document, marked with a security classification of “Secret.”

Anonymous activists say they will disseminate sensitive documents if the officer who shot James McIntyre in Dawson Creek, B.C., is not arrested by Monday at 5 p.m., Pacific time. That threat has also been made on social media and a government source confirms authorities are aware of the threat.

Activists say McIntyre was a member of Anonymous. When he was shot he appeared to be wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, often worn by supporters of the global hacktivist collective.

Anonymous says it has several secret files.

“We do have other documents and files. We are not going to speak to quantity, date of their release, manner of their release, or their topic matter at this time,” a spokesperson for a coterie of Anonymous told the Post in an interview conducted through encrypted communications.

“This will be an ongoing operation with expected surprise as a critical element.”

Anonymous made its name as a “hacktivist” collective, meting out its own form of vigilante justice to governments, religious organizations and anyone else that had rubbed its members the wrong way — from companies like MasterCard and Sony to child pornographers. But on Tuesday one of the group’s divisions shook up traders when it issued an analyst report that seemed to be more about short-selling shares than about enforcing community justice.

Anonymous Analytics may be a comparatively less-flamboyant branch of the controversial hacktivist posse, but it has the ability to move markets. Following what it called extensive due diligence and field research, it went public with claims it had uncovered “overwhelming” evidence that Chinese lubricants maker, Tianhe Chemicals Group, “is one of the largest stock market frauds ever conceived.”

In a 67-page document posted on the Anonymous Analytics website, the group alleges that Tianhe, which went public earlier this year on the Hong Kong stock exchange, tried to burnish its image through a range of illegal or unethical practices, such as creating “fake” regulatory filings, failing to disclose that some of its biggest customers were related parties, and overstating profitability.

The Mounties have charged a young offender in Quebec after the user names, passwords and credit-card information from some of Bell Canada’s small-business customers were posted online.

The RCMP say they started investigating after one of Bell’s third-party IT suppliers was cyberhacked.

As a result of the hacking, investigators say, 22,421 user names and passwords and five valid credit-card numbers were displayed for anyone to see on the Internet.

A young offender, who cannot be identified because of his age, was arrested at a Bagotville, Que., residence early Friday and charged with one count of unauthorized use of a computer and two counts of mischief in relation to data.

Police said the accused is believed to be a member of a hacktivist group NullCrew, alleged to be responsible for hacking into computers of businesses, schools and government agencies.

MONTREAL – The elusive “hacktivist” collective, identified only by its logo of a headless man in a suit or its Guy Fawkes masks, has hacked into the Syrian defence ministry and Bank of America. It has eavesdropped on Scotland Yard and the FBI. And it has outed alleged white supremacists across Canada, including a couple in Quebec City.

With over 15 million page views on its main news website and more than 560,000 Twitter followers, it’s clear the world is paying attention to this nascent form of politics – and for good cause.